This article first appeared in CounterPunch magazine for May 12, 2004. It has been edited for Labor Standard. Jack Heyman is business
agent for Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in
San Francisco. He was the longshore union official arrested during the antiwar
demonstration in the port of Oakland on April 7, 2003. He has been active in
ILWU solidarity actions since the militant 1984 anti-apartheid action in San
Francisco. For more information click
here.

“This is a
victory we’re all gonna celebrate!” exclaimed Charles Braves, deacon of the
predominantly Black longshore workers local in Charleston, South Carolina. He
was talking about the April 22 court decision by the Alameda County District
Attorney’s office to drop all the bogus charges against antiwar protesters and
a longshore union official arrested after being attacked by riot-clad police in
the port of Oakland a year ago.

The
Charleston longshoremen, themselves the victims of a police attack in their
port, had participated in one of several rallies held between the headquarters of
the Oakland Police Department (OPD) and the Alameda County Superior Courthouse.
The Bay Area protest rallies, crammed in between the police building and the courthouse,
had become both a metaphor for and a test of civil liberties in America since
9/11.

The day after
the police attack in the port of Oakland, the New York Times (April 8, 2003) quoted OPD Chief Richard Word as
saying that police dispersed the crowd at the behest of the maritime companies.
American President Lines (APL) and Stevedoring Services of America (SSA) were being
picketed for war-profiteering. SSA, a hostile anti-union outfit, received a “no
bid” contract by Bush to run the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr. Maritime employers had
even admitted that they met with the police and the Port Commission three days
before the April 7 demonstration to discuss how to handle the protest. The
California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, the state’s anti-terrorist
agency, “warned” police that they could expect violence from the protesters.
This was not so much a “police riot” as it was a planned police attack. The
Department of Homeland Security paid Oakland police nearly half a million
dollars for their “services.”

The District
Attorney’s bogus charges against the defendants were filed nearly two months
after the police attack and only when the authorities learned that a press
conference was being called to announce a civil suit against the OPD, with the
lead plaintiff being the longshore union, ILWU Local 10. Many of the nearly 50
people injured by the April 7 police attack were shot in the back, including 9
longshoremen on their way to work. Several required hospital emergency room
treatment. One hitch: the police were not allowing ambulances for protesters in
the port area. It was beyond the classic case of blaming the victim for the
crime: now, unconscionably, the victims had to suffer until medical attention
could be found. Even the United Nations, which sanctioned the U.S. war against
North Korea, and later, Vietnam and NATO’s war in Yugoslavia, cited the Oakland
police violence against antiwar activists as a “human rights” violation.

Role of Democrat Mayor Jerry Brown

The real
sideshow in this political circus is the “progressive” Democrat mayor of
Oakland, Jerry Brown, who from the very beginning defended the indefensible
police onslaught. Police had maintained that they fired on demonstrators with “less-than-lethal”
weapons only after they were pelted with rocks and bottles. Even police videos
show this to be a lie. Nevertheless, while the Oakland school system is
bankrupt, Brown was doggedly protecting his “boys in blue” by pursuing this
costly and unwinnable litigation.

A “blue ribbon”
panel, appointed to investigate, disbanded before it even convened. The City
Council and the Citizens’ Police Review Board (CPRB) held public meetings on
the police attack, which had been characterized by the New York Times as the most violent “clash” during the Iraq war. One
member of the CPRB announced that he had resigned because the Board was a sham
that whitewashed police atrocities.

One of the
Oakland 25 defendants, a legal observer, said the KGB in her native Ukraine
never treated her as badly as the OPD did. In 1997, before he was elected
mayor, Brown participated in a similar picket protest in the port of Oakland in
support of dockworkers in Liverpool, England, blocking trucks from entering the
marine terminal. He even faxed a message: “Congratulations on your efforts to
advance and protect the right of working people to join in solidarity. Free
speech is the cornerstone of a democratic society.” To date, Brown, who only a
few years ago said big business donors had corrupted both parties and was
talking about an alternative political party, has not uttered a word of
criticism of the police violence nor of international maritime companies with
whom the police colluded.

With the
implementation of IMF-type capitalist “free trade” agreements, port workers around
the world have especially been targeted for increased government repression. In
Rotterdam and Barcelona last November, dockworkers protesting a union-busting measure
in the European Parliament to privatize the ports, were viciously attacked by police.
And since the 9/11 terrorist attack, the Bush administration has steamrollered
its anti-labor agenda.

During West
Coast longshore negotiations in 2002, Defense (i.e. War) Secretary Rumsfeld and
Homeland Security Czar Ridge, threatened to occupy the docks with troops,
ostensibly for “national security” reasons, if there were any dockworker
protests that delayed ship sailings.

The Bush
administration’s coercion paved the way for a lockout of longshore workers by
Pacific Coast maritime employers, which shut West Coast ports down for ten
days. Hypocritically, this was not deemed a risk to national security. This, in
turn, was followed by Bush’s invoking of the Taft-Hartley Act at the request of
Democrat Senator Diane Feinstein, which forced longshoremen back to work under
conditions demanded by the employers.

No politician
in Washington, Democrat or Republican, spoke out against the longshore union
being shackled by this slave-labor law.

Workers Face Political Conundrum

Moreover, the
“war on terror”—with its attendant legislation, the Patriot Act, Homeland Security
Act, ad infinitum, as well as the imperialist war in Iraq—enjoys bipartisan support, from Democrats as
well as Republicans. How do working people solve this political conundrum
without wading into the “lesser of two evils” swamp?

Longshore Local
10, which has inspired many by its stands on social and political issues
through dock actions—against South African apartheid, in solidarity with
anti-WTO protesters in Seattle, for freedom for Black political prisoner Mumia
Abu-Jamal, in protest against the bloody Pinochet military dictatorship in
Chile—now is calling for a Million Worker March on Washington on October 16 (<www.millionworkermarch.org>).

March Independent of Both Parties

This march is
to be independent of both the Democrat and Republican Parties. Organizers say
it’s time for the working class to stop being the whipping boy for capitalist
greed—no more cannon fodder for imperialist wars, defend workers’ rights, civil
rights and civil liberties, an end to the piracy of public institutions through
privatization, increased funding for social needs like health care, education, housing,
and jobs.

The power of
workers, they say, has to be harnessed into a massive protest mobilization in
Washington to demonstrate to the ruling class that their political monopoly
will no longer go unchallenged. The momentum for the longshoremen’s call for the
march seems to be growing with endorsements from the San Francisco, Charleston
(South Carolina), and Albany and Troy (New York) Labor Councils, Long Island
City Teamsters’ Local 808, an IBEW local in Philadelphia, the Northern
California Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, the Black Caucus of the
Teamsters Union, and other unions and community groups around the country. Danny
Glover and Dick Gregory have signed on as well.

The last time
longshoremen were shot by police, in 1934, it provoked a general strike in San
Francisco. It is a history that is imbedded in the culture of longshore workers
on the West Coast waterfront.

AFL-CIO
officials have either been intimidated by or bought into Bush’s “war on terror”
and the Iraq war, but not so the rank and file. Portland longshore worker Jack
Mulcahy intoned, ”If the ports had been shut down when police fired on longshoremen
and antiwar activists, maybe the government would never have filed charges.”

Government
repression and employer takeaways are the tinder that fuels the fire for mass
marches.

Kick-Off Rally for Million Worker March

[Note: The following Kick-Off
Rally for the MILLION WORKER MARCH ON WASHINGTON, D.C.—OCTOBER 16 will be held
on Saturday, May 22, at 8 p.m., at the ILWU Local 10 Hiring Hall, 400 North
Point (@ Mason), San Francisco, California.]